Activists chirping, but cricket protest fails

MONTREAL •A group of anarchists hoped to use crickets to express their opposition to a new Montreal-area immigration detention centre.

They are boasting on their website of recently unleashing “thousands” of the chirping insects inside a building housing a Montreal architectural firm that was awarded a contract for the centre.

But it didn’t actually turn out the way they wanted.

Montreal architectural firm Lemay, one of the companies hired to work on the project in Laval, was targeted by Montreal Counter-Information, which describes itself as a website for anarchists to “diffuse their ideas and actions.”

The group says its “amateur construction crew released thousands of crickets” into Lemay’s newly built headquarters last month.

It called the action the beginning of a concerted effort to stop construction of the Laval holding centre, which is scheduled to be ready in 2021.

It said crickets are known to reproduce quickly, are difficult to exterminate and that their constant noise makes them a nuisance.

But that’s not the way things turned out — the crickets actually ended up in another locale and were pretty quiet.

The president of Montreal engineering firm ELEMA, which rents space in the same building, recently moved in and was in the process of renovating.

“There was a wooden panel that served as a door at the rear,” Dominic Miron said in an interview Wednesday.

“They just moved the panel and placed about 100 crickets next to the door and left (and) when we arrived around 6:30 in the morning, we found them, called an exterminator and swept them up with a broom.”

Miron described the insects he discovered as pet shop crickets.

“It’s not the big crickets that are found in nature which we hear all summer ... they are small crickets that don’t make much noise,” he added.

Miron said the activists stole nothing from his office and there was no damage.

“They wanted to cause a sensation, but they didn’t get what they wanted,” he said.

The federal government is investing $56.1 million in the new Laval holding facility, which is part of a national plan to improve immigration detention centres, including facilities in Toronto and Vancouver.